He doesn't do it often, but sometimes, instead of sleeping, he'll stay up till the advent of the dawn watching the colors sweep across the schoolgrounds.

Tonight, he's caught up in the gloaming purples and twilight hues, staring in rapt fascination as they saturate the trees outside his office. He's got his hands pressed together like a penitent kneeling at mass, and he thinks that, in a sense, yes, that must be right. Heresey like what he and his have wrought demands penance, and perhaps he may one day hear the notes of absolution sounded around him.

He cocks his head as something creeps onto the borders of his awareness. There's residue here, an echo of a thing, a sort of stain that's lingering on the fringes of his senses. Without doing anything so bold as turning to face her, he acknowledges her. Inclines his head, just so she knows he's waiting.

"The valse," she begins, and he can hear the scritch of music scraping along the insides of his ears, the three-fourths cadence bucking gently under his feet, "originated in Germany. A courtly dance, an expression of affinity and respect between equals. The woman leads the man as much as he thinks he does her."

He can feel her approach him more than he can hear her. She brings one arm about in a lazy circle, hooking his head in the crook of her elbow, and she leans around and pushes him gently down into his chair.

He isn't sure, but he thinks that he smiles into the fall of her hair. The light refracts purple in the crystals of her eyes. "And are you planning on teaching me to dance, Emma?"

And her lips curl around his name, and he can hear her press the sounds of him against the roof of her mouth, and he has to pause and remember that she's not really here, that the crystalline perfection of her is laid out shattered several hundred yards below him. "Charles," she says to him in the spaces of his mind, "you and I have been dancing all this time."